At this point we have to assume that all our national and societal institutions are impotent or have been co-opted by the forces of darkness.
— Matthew H.

Matthew H. writes:

In the entry, “Massachusetts continues to lead America over the edge,” you wrote:

“More and more, I feel that what I have often said about Britain—that its leftism is so deeply embedded in the elites and the people that it cannot be turned around before it has destroyed the society—is true of America as well.”

Recently, when the United States Marine Corps decided not to expel the Marine who had participated in a sodomite porno that included images of his Marine uniform, I commented that America is spiritually dead. The news that Massachusetts has outlawed “discrimination” against the “transgendered’ further confirms that judgment.

At this point we have to assume that all our national and societal institutions are impotent or have been co-opted by the forces of darkness. A United States Marine engaging in sodomy on camera? A law granting male perverts access to ladies’ rooms? One of our most prominent media personages, “gay” Anderson Cooper, bringing us a heart-warming interview with an eight year old “trans-gender” boy and his adoring parents? [LA adds: Let us also remember that Cooper, CNN’s main on-air personality, last year used the filthy expression “tea baggers” on the tea party, yet continues to be treated by left and right as a legitimate correspondent; for example, the GOP candidates, without a peep of protest, accepted him as the moderator in one of their debates.]

These incidents are just a few glimmers out of a thousand points of blight.

More and more the State and the majority of the centers of power and influence seem to be controlled by people who somehow combine the topsy-turvy nuttiness of an old Batman TV show villain with the clinical efficiency of the SS. We are beset by hosts of smutty, totalitarian buffoons.

We talk amongst ourselves, “Isn’t it awful…. ” But we are on the outside, awaiting the next enormity to be flung out at us. All our commentaries and chronicles seem to drown in the pandemonium. There are lots of us out here but we are disunited with no real institutional foundation whatsoever. America has indeed become what leftists and foolish conservatives have so long said it was, a “proposition nation.” It is a proposition nation in the sense that it no longer exists as anything but an idea. Its concrete manifestation as a proud nation and culture is finished. America, the nation, is … dead.

If it is ever again to have a tangible existence it will either have to be rebuilt from the very spiritual bedrock or be refined in a purifying cataclysm.

- end of initial entry -

Steve W. writes:

Regarding Matthew H.’s remarks:

I think any objective observer of contemporary history and politics would conclude that the United States of America—the nation represented by the Founding Fathers and the pioneers and the farmers and the inventors and the industrialists and the sturdy men and women who raised families, maintained their communities, prospered, and prevailed in two world wars—no longer exists and, more to the point, will never exist again. That nation has been wiped out in the past 50 years by demographic and ideological and commercial forces that cannot be undone.

Socialism, multiculturalism, hedonism, consumerism, et al., are running roughshod over their opponents. This nation never again will be 90 percent white European stock. It will never abolish the welfare state. It will never roll back the power and intrusiveness of government. It will never restore modesty and decency and civility to the public square. Our culture will become only more stupid and cheap and vulgar. (The movie Idiocracy is positively prophetic on this point.)

Sure, there still is fighting to be done on the margins (e.g., amnesty, Obamacare, taxes), but the traditionalist side is losing and will continue to lose. We all know it. We all are struggling with this realization. We all are trying to decide what this means for how we should live our lives. I think we are in the midst of an existential crisis of civilizational proportions. I don’t have any answers. Frankly, I don’t think there are any. The nation that we know and love is as doomed as the Titanic. Believing otherwise won’t make it any less so.

Please understand: I am not saying that, on balance, we do not lead good lives in this country. We do. I am not saying that there is no value in “fighting the good fight.” There is. And I am not saying that, every once in a while, the traditionalist side might win an important battle. It will. But “the forces of darkness,” as Matthew puts it, have won the war. I think the election of Barack Obama as president proves this point, conclusively. What we are witnessing now is simply the mopping up operation of contemporary liberalism (which infects Democrats and Republicans alike). Will that liberalism “destroy the [nation] in order to save it”? Surely. But destroy it, it will.

Buck O. writes:

About forty years ago, we had lost track of a three month old kitten. My girlfriend and I didn’t realize that it had entered the garage and, as cats will do, sought warmth by laying atop one of the front wheels of the car near the engine. We drove out and saw the ignorant and flattening cat on the concrete. I stopped the car and we got out. My girlfriend, who was very hands-on and “earthy,” reached down and picked up the crushed kitten in both hands, against all hope, feeling for a pulse. I was stunned. I said to her: “My God, woman, was there a shread of doubt that that mangled and bloody kitten was dead?”

Maybe it’s possible that it could have bounced, but I don’t think so.

LA replies:

I don’t think the analogy entirely works. Biological death is absolute and final. Political death is more complicated, it has many stages, and at least partial reversal is possible. Which is part of the meaning of the saying, “There is much ruin in a great nation.” America is not to be compared to an animal that is crushed and dead. Obviously it still functions in all kinds of ways.

So instead of asking, “Is the American nation dead?” (the original title of this entry), we need to ask in what respects is America dead or not dead. Steve W.’s nuanced yet undeluded treatment of the issue provides a good basis for further discussion.

LA continues:

In past articles, I’ve discussed in what precise sense we are “dead.” For example, in a 2007 thread, “Buchanan book says America is on “‘a path to national suicide,’” I wrote:

Let’s stipulate that America is “dead.” Dead in what respect? In all respects? Or just in some respects? Irreversibly, or reversibly? I myself have said things such as that “Britain is dead,” or “America no longer exists,” the title of an article I wrote five months before the 9/11 attack, but I always carefully qualified those statements. By “America no longer exists,” I meant, not that America literally didn’t exist, but that America in key respects no longer had the will to defend its existence as a nation. [emphasis added]. That didn’t mean that such will could not be recovered. In every article last year in which I sounded the note that “Britain is dead,” I said, as it is now it is dead, but it could recover.

In a 2006 thread, “The only way the West can be saved,” I further defined the nature of the death and spoke about what had to happen for the apparent death to turn around:

All of which comes down to the belief—for us, a sacred belief—that we must not define ourselves as a group, a collective whole, and therefore must not define any other group as fundamentally different from our group. [Emphasis added.]

This is the belief that led the West to admit millions of unassimilable, hostile, and dangerous aliens into the West, and this is the belief that even now makes it impossible for Westerners to think critical thoughts about Islam as such, let alone to take effective action, or even imagine taking effective action, against it. In April 2001 I wrote an article called “America No Longer Exists,” by which I meant that America no longer sees itself as a nation, culture, and people, and therefore is unable to respond to obvious threats to itself as a nation, culture, and people. The same state of spiritual non-existence is much further advanced in Europe, especially Britain. Liberalism, by taking over the minds and hearts and souls of the Western peoples, has literally dissolved them as peoples. Having done so, it is now leading them to their political and civilizational destruction as well .

Now, what can turn this hideous situation around? There is only one thing that can do it: Westerners must feel the horror that liberalism has wrought. When they see their societies progressively taken over by Muslims, when they see Muslim sharia being implanted and enforced in more and more parts of their country, when they see Islam being taught in their children’s schools and promulgated in the mass media, when they see Muslim imams in the councils of state, when they hear the Muslims’ increasingly strident demands for every more Islamization, when they see Muslim razzias (a.k.a. riots and “random” murders) grow in intensity and audacity, when they see the government paralyzed even in the face of the most palpable crimes and threats, and when, most importantly, they feel the horror and despair and pain and humiliation of all this, and when, finally, they see that this situation was brought about by and is sustained by LIBERALISM, by the liberal belief that the acceptance of alien cultures is the highest virtue of society, then, only at that point, they will see that LIBERALISM, which they had imagined to be the fairest good, is the darkest and most disgusting evil, the smiling destroyer that has seduced them to their ruin. Then, and only then, will they be ready to repent of their liberalism and start defending themselves and their civilization.

How has my position changed from what it was in past years? In the 2006 entry I said that Europeans and Americans’ acceptance of Islam in the West would only stop after Islam had gained a lot of power and caused great harm. So I already had a very grim view then. But, still, my idea or hope was that, as bad as things became before they could turn around, they would turn around in time to save the civilization. I no longer feel that. I feel that the power of liberalism over the souls of the great mass of Westerners is such that they will keep following liberalism all the way into the abyss. I don’t know that I’m right. I hope I’m wrong. But that is the way I see things now.

Also, the above material is not meant to be an exhaustive treatment of the meaning of national death. For example, there is moral and spiritual death as well as “national identity” death. But these are all related.

James R. writes:

Regarding your initial comment quoted by Matthew H. and Matthew’s, Steven W.’s, and Buck O.’s follow ups: If this is true, what should we do? I know you don’t want us all to slip into Mark Steynism and just watch the passing parade with either amusement or contempt. So what should be done?

Steve W. says he doesn’t think there are any answers; your remarks after Buck O.’s suggests there might be something—but what?

Keeping in mind the common pitfall of over-estimating the velocity of these changes, I think there’s not much time left: this will unfold within our lifetimes. So we need to think about what we can do to salvage what we can and rebuild, or at least be prepared to lay the foundations for revival. We need to think about how to prepare so that we will not have to do this in a way that would compromise our principles and be indescribably bloody (there is a non-trivial chance that the left will provide and engage in many opportunities for bloodshed, but we should want to minimize this and minimize our involvement in it except where necessary to protect each other from it and preserve as much as possible from it).

I wish I had answers myself.

Hannon writes:

Matthew H. writes:

“If it is ever again to have a tangible existence it will either have to be rebuilt from the very spiritual bedrock or be refined in a purifying cataclysm.”

I see these two developments as working sequentially: the cataclysm first, reducing our world to the spiritual (and perhaps material) bedrock, and the rebuilding following. It is not an either/or proposition. This kind of discussion always brings me back to this quote (attribution is awkward):

Great nations rise and fall. The people go from bondage to spiritual truth, to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back again to bondage.

We are very close to the terminal stages of this cycle.

LA replies:

That oft-described cycle of the upward and downward course of a civilization is accurate, but is only part of our picture. There are things going on in the contemporary West for which there are no historical precedents, and which no philosophers ever anticipated. However, when it comes to the consequences of democracy and diversity, no one came closer than Plato in Book VIII of The Republic, as I discussed in my 1991 speech, “The Real ‘PC.’”

To summarize the chief points in Plato’s description of the democratic stage of society (which follows the oligarchic (commercial) stage and precedes the tyrannical stage):

- There is, first of all, unlimited personal freedom; a tremendous diversity of types of people; and love of diversity for its own sake.

- People only fulfil their civic obligations or obey the law if they feel like it, since obedience smacks of servitude and they will have no master over them.

- Leaders must constantly appease the people out of fear of being called oligarchs; parents are afraid of their children and are extremely mild with them; the teacher fears and fawns upon the pupil.

- All desires are equally to be esteemed, with no distinction between noble and base desires.

- Equality is “granted indiscriminately to equals and unequals alike.”

- And finally, says Plato, the resident alien and foreigner are regarded as equal to the citizen.

Doug H. writes:

The situation seems dire, and I have contemplated often the question of what to do. I especially liked the point you made that things are happening now which are unprecedented. How could people long ago have fathomed a people who would as a group commit cultural suicide?

JC in Detroit writes:

Let me propose an analogy:

It is early 1945. Considering that the regime has slaughtered millions and millions of Jews and millions and millions of other “enemies of the state,” is there anything which the Nazi Government, in any of its institutions, could do which was, according to any agreed upon definition of the word, legitimate? Or was it too far gone?

Our public institutions—courts, legislatures, executive branches, state and federal—have been morally compromised by the commission of, or complicity in, the mass murder of 50 million unborn humans, or thereabouts. This is Mao. This is Stalin. This is Pol Pot. This is Hitler.

We have renounced our founding. We have denied the most fundamental human rights of life and liberty to millions of our fellow citizens on a completely arbitrary basis: that they happened to be unborn. Like others happened to be Jews, or Armenians, or had college educations, or owned land.

So, does that answer the question?

LA repies:

Abortion is a very bad thing and mass abortion is a terrible crime and stain on our country. It never occurred to me, and I do not agree with you now, that the widespread practice of abortion in and of itself means that America doesn’t deserve to go on existing. I have always resisted the Pro-life movement’s reduction of conservatism to the abortion issue. The Pro-lifers have their own suicidal-liberal blind spots. Most Pro-lifers support mass open immigration. Many of them are followers of Pope John Paul’s doctrine of the “Culture of Life,” which says that immigration restrictions are a sin similar to abortion, and which requires Western countries to open themselves unconditionally to all people in the world who want to immigrate there. So my answer to you is that I regard most ideological Pro-lifers (apart from the abortion issue itself) not as sound conservative thinkers, but as extremist liberal proponents of Western suicide.

I am not an ideological pro-lifer. I am a conservative Catholic. I do not support, in any way, the suicide of our society by mass uncontrolled immigration. Nor do I believe we have utterly delegitimated ourselves by the mass murder of abortion. Perhaps I exaggerated. Had Stauffenberg been successful … well, who knows what could have been worked out had the machine been stopped.

But as the corpses pile up and the stench from the ovens pollutes the landscape, we, as they, lose our souls. Regardless of what else transpires. But yes, there are certainly many other atrocities which the left and their accomplices are committing against humanity.

Matthew H. replies:

A point I would emphasize is that one by one the institutions that formerly manifested and nurtured the cultural identity of the American People, our churches, our governments, our schools and universities, our private sector corporations, even our military, have been hijacked or hamstrung. It is this America, defined as the set consisting of nearly all social aggregations above the level of the nuclear family, which I believe is dead. While there are plenty of good and godly people left, we are on our own in enemy territory. To restore America we not only will not have access to our former institutional supports, we must also overcome them.

Our situation is grim but not hopeless. Our enemies’ fatal weakness is their foolish confidence in their control over social institutions severed from the spiritual roots that formerly gave them life. We, on the other hand, have the understanding that comes from humility before God. And throughout scripture we are taught that a small thing, if it is sound, will prosper even against apparently insurmountable odds: Gideon and his 300, David vs. Goliath, the mustard seed, the Church itself.

Alexis Zarkov writes:

I think it would take more than 40 years to repair the damage done by the left. Even to begin the such a task, we would need to purge people like Howard Zinn from the public schools and universities. Just this one man alone has done incalculable damage to the minds of our young people with his People’s History of the United States. Daniel Flynn, writing on the History News Network, sums it up:

Who is the most influential historian in America? Could it be Pulitzer Prize winners Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. or Joseph Ellis or David McCullough, whose scholarly works have reached a broad literary public? The answer is none of the above. The accolade belongs instead to the unreconstructed, anti-American Marxist Howard Zinn, whose cartoon anti-history of the United States is still selling 128,000 copies a year twenty years after its original publication. Many of those copies are assigned readings for courses in colleges and high schools taught by leftist disciples of their radical mentor.

Thus Zinn continues to wreck our young minds from the grave. One can see their cartoon-like thinking in the demands from some of the Occupy Wall Street shock troops. Here are a few:

Restoration of the living wage … Another policy that must be instituted is raise the minimum wage to twenty dollars an hour.

Free college education.

Immediate across the board debt forgiveness for all.

Open borders migration…. anyone can travel anywhere to work and live….

… bring the fossil fuel economy to an end while at the same bringing the alternative energy economy up to energy demand.

Needless to say, these demands are inconsistent. Indeed, this particular set of demands is so extreme even the official spokesmen from OccupyWallStreet.org collective reject them. Nevertheless, I think they represent the thinking of many young people. They are the inevitable product of our current educational system.

I don’t see how we can “bring back America” without raising a couple of new generations who are free of the psychological toxins destroying America. This is why God had the Israelites wander in the desert for 40 years. We might get that in the form of a ruined economy.

Hannon writes:

Thanks for posting Plato’s key points. Could you briefly summarize the aspects of our current state that you see as unprecedented? If it is the mass immigration of the Other that has wrought the greatest negative modern change in our society, how is this very different from the dynasties that have come (and gone) before? Allowing for the importance of slavery in the Bad Old Days, could they have been like us, anticipating and fulfilling material labor needs and then paving over the resulting difficulties with “diversity” and non-discrimination doctrine?

LA replies:

I am not aware of any past society that turned against itself as the modern West has done, demonizing itself and worshipping aliens and enemies.

I am not aware of any historical precedent for a nation which, after having its soldiers mass murdered by a jihadist Muslim who was an officer in that nation’s army, in the government’s official report about the mass murder did not even mention that the killer was a Muslim, let alone an outspoken jihadist who killed in the name of Islam. I am not aware of any precedent for the Chief of Staff of the Army saying that it would have been a greater tragedy to have apprehended the killer before he killed (because that would have harmed the Army’s “diversity”), than to let him proceed with the killing. See “George Casey, accessory after the fact to mass murder.”

I could go on and on with other unprecedented things.

Alexis Zarkov writes:

Mr. Auster writes, “I am not aware of any past society that turned against itself as the modern West has done, demonizing itself and worshipping aliens and enemies.” Yes! This is a most important point that needs repeating. Humans have a natural tendency to identify with, and support their family, clan, race, religion, nation etc. Our current situation is unprecedented in history (as far as I know). A big fraction of the white race now hates itself. In my opinion, self loathing is the worst of all possible worlds. We in the West fell into this hellhole through the efforts of a most perverse educational system. My daughter went to an elite private middle and high school. I watched the content of her courses like a hawk. I had to correct their propaganda many times. As bad as that was, her experience at an Ivy League school was even worse. Relentless propaganda against white people, men, the U.S., capitalism etc. But somehow she survived with her mind intact. Today she’s a relentless foe of liberalism and is in a position to do something about it. There is hope, but we have a long road to travel. If the Republicans win the White House and Congress, then we need to push for a law that withholds federal funds from any university with speech codes. And that law must have teeth with something like the EEOC as an enforcer. Let students sue their school and have their attorney fees paid just as in a civil rights lawsuit. If the university retaliates against a complaining student, then it suffers a large fine. Universities love money more than anything else. They will quickly fall in line.

November 19

Michael Hart writes:

The United States as a whole is too far gone, and cannot recover. However, if we split in two—roughly red/blue lines, the red country can survive and flourish. (The blue country, of course, will deteriorate even more rapidly.) No, I don’t think we will split up, but working for that is our best chance.

Steve W. writes:

With every day that passes , we witness the further decline and degradation of our country. To wit: the President of the United States has sent a condolence note for the death of an obese rapper, known as “Heavy D,” praising him for his “many contributions to American music,” which was read to a “star-studded” funeral audience by Al Sharpton. You cannot make this up. This is straight out of a Tyler Perry movie. Surely Mark Steyn will riff humorously about this event. I certainly hope so. Perhaps humor is all we have left. After all, no one in public life could dare criticize the president for this embarrassing behavior. It would be “racist” to do so.

Karl J. writes:

America has indeed become what leftists and foolish conservatives have so long said it was, a “proposition nation.” It is a proposition nation in the sense that it no longer exists as anything but an idea. Its concrete manifestation as a proud nation and culture is finished. America, the nation, is … dead.

Um, excuse me, but what about this big, powerful, prosperous, (relatively) free and democratic English-speaking nation (however dysfunctional) that still exists between Canada and Mexico? Have we been conquered and scattered to the four corners of the earth, like the Ten Lost Tribes? Not yet, anyway.

It seems to me that this point of view is just a right-wing sort of propositionalism: America doesn’t conform to your idea of what it once was and ought to be, so woe, woe, all is lost! This is just the flip side of the left-wing notion that this nation was conceived in racist-sexist-homophobic sin. America has never lived up to their utopian delusions, so to hell with it!

We need to remind ourselves and each other of who we are. America is a historic, quasi-organic entity, a continuity of people, place, customs and institutions that has persisted for 400 years and counting, changing (sometimes radically) and growing, generation by generation. Yes, we are facing an existential crisis—perhaps the most severe ever—but we’ve faced such crises before: the Revolution, the Civil War, the Great Depression and WW2—and triumphed. The colonies became a united and independent Republic; the Union was preserved, and slavery abolished; however much you disapprove of the New Deal, it was a political success, and the post-war America shaped by it is the lost Golden Age to most conservatives. [LA replies: Those historic crises are not analogous to what we have now. In those past crises there was a threat that was met by a country that believed in itself. Today, all the institutions that control America are devoted to an ideology that spells the death of America.]

America is, in fact, a distinct nation, not a set of ideas, whatever we think of it. Social facts are resilient, and rooted in nature. This political culture of ethnophobia and xenocentricity is perverse, unnatural, self-contradictory, and unsustainable. It is a testament to the wealth, power, and freedom of America that we can afford to indulge this madness as long as we have. Yes, there’s a danger that the nihilism will consume us as it destroys itself. But it remains to be seen how deep the rot has really gone. As Peter Brimelow keeps saying, the abolition of America has yet to be put to a vote. As the crisis worsens, I expect more and more of us to remember who we are, and wake up to reality, until we reach critical mass.

And a lot depends on your conception of the moral rot. Ultimately, the sheer will to survive as a nation is in itself what fundamentally matters; everything else is dependent upon that, even our material security as individuals (unless you can find a good bolt-hole somewhere in Idaho, say). If you obsess over trivia, or engage in moralistic grandstanding, or declare any one particular atrocity to be the final and absolute tipping-point, what do you accomplish? How are you strengthening our nationality?

LA replies:

Given current realities, how and where can this “sheer will to survive as a nation” manifest itself? Liberalism is the reigning belief in all levels of American society. Yes, individuals and small groups may have such a will or desire, and the work of traditionalists is to increase their numbers and organize, both for the purpose of resisting the reigning liberalism where it can be resisted, and for the purpose of creating new communities (whether within the existing society or as breakaways), the form of which we cannot now foresee. But even if there were a traditionalist movement ten times as organized as anything we have now, I don’t think it would have any fundamental effect on the mainstream institutions and beliefs. It would be ignored and closed out. That’s why, as I see things now, I no longer hope for America as a whole to turn around.

Buck O. writes:

You’ve reacted to several of my past remarks with disagreement, even calling me irresponsible, or simply ignoring me. That’s not a complaint or a criticism, and I mean that. You have a point of view that seems to be built on solid granite. You appear to be willing to fight to the end for what you believe is still right and still exists. Your “never say die” spirit is remarkable. What I think is different about you and me, other than you being much smarter, is that I think that we need to begin again, and not waste our time and effort on this dead horse. You think that we can make a comeback, what would be a miracle win. I don’t think that we have the tools and equipment necessary for a comeback. As you have so well articulated, the context in which the American nation thrived, is why it thrived. That context no longer exists. The American nation cannot exist without restoring that context. How does that happen in an alien country, growing ever more alien by the day?

Perhaps what I’m saying it redundant, that as a practical matter, what’s the difference?

There is a different mindset which motivates a revolutionary as opposed to a reactionary. We have to think differently. It’s already proven to be pointless to keep acting as if we are actually playing a meaningful role. As I said repeatedly, we chronicle and analyze it to death, but we have no clue how to act. The reason is clear. Call it what you want. The American nation is dead, or it no longer exists, the American people that made up the American nation are dead, or dying off and disappearing—the birth-replacement is negative—or, they accept that they are powerless and will simply live out their lives with regret. As Steve W. says, in “provide(ing) a good basis for further discussion”: “the nation … no longer exists and, more to the point, will never exist again,” by “forces that cannot be undone.” That sounds like annihilation, if it no longer exists. There cannot be “ex-nililation”—something from nothing. Something new has to be created to take its place.

That is the only way that I think a productive discussion can proceed. Begin again. To quote myself, “The only way to get it again, is to get it the way it was got in the first place”

I come at most of these things late and uneducated, but like the old carpenter and builder that I am. I learned from experience and have acquired certain confidence that every successful project is started before it’s ready, doesn’t matter how long we plan (planning is good), how well we detail it and how well we’re staged for action, it’s the act of showing up at the site and firing up my tools that gets it started and works out the unknowns always leads to success. Getting the juices flowing by physically doing something, engages the mind in the action that gets the job done. Talking is how we communicate, acting is how things get done. We’re actors with nothing to do. We rehearse our lines ad nauseam.

We, traditional conservatives, I consider to be the last Americans. I know that’s contentious. But we need to be contentious, or worse, with the clueless and disagreeable majority. We’re the endangered species. We’re the remnants of the American nation that no longer exists. But we have no job site to show up at, no working tools and no power source of our own. We haven’t a clue where to go or what to do. That is what we need to be trying to figure out. Pounding on a dead horse that will never get up and carry our saddle again is delusional. We keep analyzing, and drawing, and referencing the code books, which are all written by the wrong authority. We have no clue where in hell the job site is. Is it our own homes, our neighbors’ homes, the homes and enclaves of the multiple cultures that have taken territory here, or all that simply don’t understand? Is it the steps of government? Is it the urban blue or the surrounding red? Is it the streets? We’ve been through all of this countless times.

We have a template. Consider it that and build something new. We’ve discussed that and we’ve scrutinized our mistakes and failures. We know why it ended. We must think and act as revolutionaries and stop reacting to what we can’t stop.

Some believe that we can talk our way out of this, but that it may take many generations to succeed. That makes no sense, if we’re already gone.